Philip Calvert talks social media at MBE 2014
02 October 2014
Mortgage Business Expo (MBE) 2014 is delighted to welcome back, by popular demand, Philip Calvert, the founder of award-winning social networking site for financial advisers and providers, LifeTalk. Philip will be speaking the show on 8th October as part of the CII accredited seminar programme, about how to make the most of LinkedIn as a valuable strategic asset of your business. Here he provides a taster of what to expect.
How did you get into speaking about social media?
My background’s in financial services and I’ve worked for many life, pension and mortgage providers. I set up an industry specific social networking site in 2004, which began as a discussion group on another site and grew to the point it needed its own. We discovered that if you ask a financial adviser if they have a LinkedIn profile, they’d say yes, but wouldn’t entirely know why. It’s the same with Twitter, and many say they don’t use Facebook at all outside of their personal accounts, yet they tell me most of their leads come from friends, family and existing customers, so technically they are. However, there is no strategy, social media is simply bolted on and then people wonder why it isn’t working for them. I speak at conferences throughout the UK and overseas, advising how they can be useful tools for our industry by taking the next step into planning and strategy.
What motivated the decision to support MBE?
I was asked and I said yes! But seriously, MBE is a great platform, and by speaking it allows me to access people who perhaps haven’t seen our website before, or who don’t know that we can run workshops for those wishing to find out more.
Can you offer a taster of what people can expect?
I’m going to show that LinkedIn can be used as a generation tool. Many advisers perceive it to be little more than a jobs site, that’s why most people joined, but it has changed in the last three years. Like any software, and it is software at the end of the day, once you have been trained to use it properly you wonder how you managed without it. I’ll also look at how consumers are using social media, and provide tips to dramatically improve visibility on LinkedIn.
Visitors who would like to attend the Mortgage Business Expo London 2014 can do so by registering at: www.mortgagebusinessexpo.com. Philip can be followed on Twitter at @philipcalvert.
